The 200 Year War

During the second week James was returning to his cave with another load of supplies when a squadron of aircraft passed overhead. They circled the area several times, crisscrossing the valley. As they banked away James could see the sunlight reflect on camera lenses in their bellies. They were taking photos of the countryside.

Several hours later, another flight of planes came down the valley at low altitude. These were large bloated tankers. Each one was trailing a stream of yellow vapor from its wings. The vapor was settling to the ground in the valley where a small herd of cattle were grazing. Suddenly they began to toss their heads and bellow, staggered around, and fell to the ground thrashing and kicking, then lay still. All this took about five minutes.

Gas! The dirty son of a bitches are gassing the towns!" James shouted. "That does it! These bastards are going to pay for this! I’ll find a way to get back at them," he promised, gritting his teeth. "But how? What can I do against an army."

For days the yellow mist hung in the valleys, flowing into the low areas like a dirty current of water. Any living thing that strayed into its path fell dead in a matter of minutes. James had been lucky. He had been on a high hill overlooking the valley and up wind from the path of the planes.

The town in the higher elevations were clear of the gas within a couple of weeks and James dared to venture into them to continue his scavenging. He found dead bloated bodies where the gas had done its work. It had killed every living thing it touched, even insects.

James spent all summer rounding up anything that might be useful in the future, (If he had a future). In some of the fine mansions and hunting lodges, he found some very expensive hunting and target rifles, reloading equipment, bullet molds, and large stores of food. He hauled all these items back to the caves, along with quite a few power tools, and several gasoline and diesel generators, and what articles of furniture he needed to make his hiding place comfortable.

In mid November, he stumbled across an army post. What garrison had been left behind to defend the post had been killed by the gas attack. The rain and wind had carried away the stench, and the post was his to explore at will.

In a securely locked vault, which he spent several hours burning his way into with a cutting torch from the post’s motor pool, he found some night vision equipment, high powered scopes and instruction manuals for their use and repair. The manuals were all stamped "TOP SECRET" in large red letters. In the armory he found large quantities of rifles, some equipped with silencers and scopes. This had evidently been a training post for reserves, and was well equipped.

By dawn the next day, he had loaded his truck and a large trailer with all the equipment he could get on them and headed back to the cave. As he made his way back up the winding mountain road with his badly overloaded truck, he got his first glimpse of the enemy.

Far down the valley, where the interstate wound its way through the mountains, a convoy of drab green trucks and tanks were speeding along the highway.

Returning to the cave, he unloaded and inventoried what he had salvaged from the army post. Among other things, his hoard contained sixty rifles equipped with powerful scopes and silencers, Sniper rifles. This gave him an idea. He picked out several of the expensive hunting rifles he had collected and began testing them, and comparing their performance to the military rifles. The 300 savage seemed to be the best all round weapon for his needs. He spent the rest of the winter pawing over manuals on the night vision equipment, hunting through the towns for milling equipment ;and learning to use it to adapt the silencers, night vision equipment, and scopes to fit the 300 savage.